


Night-blooming

by inlovewithnight



Category: Skeleton Key (2005 Movie)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:02:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set post-movie; beware massive spoilers.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Night-blooming

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-movie; beware massive spoilers.

The first thing Cecile does is put all of the mirrors back.

"Something worth looking at again," she says, blowing a stream of smoke toward the glass and admiring the image reflected through it—thick bright hair, taut young skin, the lines of her wrist and her fingers holding the cigarette. Not exactly what she'd hoped for; too pale, too short, a faint scar above the left knee, but _young_.

"Feels so good," she says, and then she sings it, belting the words out in her strong new voice that doesn't waver or catch in a dry old throat, making them ring through the big old house. "Feels so _goo-oo-d!_"

"What does?" Justify asks from the bedroom, and she dances down the hall to him, waving her arms and shaking her hips and reveling in this body that _moves_ and _feels_ and simmers with the fierce, hot energy of youth.

"Not being stuck in that dried-up old bag anymore." She slips up behind him, runs her hands along his back, tickles him under the ribcage to make him squirm. "You got out of the old man a hell of a lot sooner."

"Only a few months, Cecile."

"Felt like forever." She nuzzles his neck and thinks about those first few days when he was in his new skin, how he ran naked through the house and laughed until he fell to his knees, the joy on his face more than enough to chase the ugly twist of jealousy out of the pit of her stomach. They'd known it wouldn't always be as easy as two children near enough to twins and innocent as chickens to the slaughter, or a married couple coming along, a dirt-stupid married couple who could be swept in by a few simple charms and then knocked over by a little extra whiskey in their drinks.

She had just had to be a little more patient this time, wait a little longer. She'd passed the time by playing games with that idiot stuck in the old man's body, drawing out the hours when he wasn't drugged dumb just to watch him twist and moan and cry in that chair, then kiss the tears off his withered old cheeks and laugh at him for having to die before his time, while she and her man were going to live forever.

"Feels good," she growls in his ear, making him shiver and then making him jump as she slides one hand around his hip and down into his lap.

"Cecile," he says, and if she closes her eyes his voice almost sounds the same, the low rough edge that's just a man who's about to throw her down on her back and take her good and hard.

"Justify." Her voice is teasing, her hand is not, and he groans a little under his breath.

"_Cecile_."

"Right here, baby." She bites down on his earlobe and he says something dirty low under his breath. "Come and get me."  
**  
They have to be careful about going into town; the girl wasn't native but she'd lived here long enough to have that roommate, friends, maybe some ex-lovers around. Enough that someone in the crowd might recognize her face. The boy had been nobody. A native son for the voice, the walk, the old country roots that he hated but that loosened the soil so belief could seep in like rain. But he'd been away for a long time, just traveling through when they found him, just some idiot looking for antiques who showed a little too much interest in a book on hoodoo. He got himself invited home for dinner and eaten for dessert and nobody's missed him yet.

Quick trips into town, mostly, for cigarettes and food and magazines. She's never going to get over all the pretty things out there in the world these days, and Justify's been crazy for Hollywood since just after he was himself, following all the gossip about movie stars and the scandals and the next big things that never are.

Maybe next time they'll go out there to California, find somebody burning up with fame as well as youth. Have to bring them back here to the bayou eventually, though. Cecile won't leave her swamps and her house and her spell room behind. They're more a part of her than her bones, now, by a thousand times or more.

They're careful, so damn careful, even though nobody would believe the truth if they wrote it in the sky with airplanes. They wait a month before they go to buy new clothes, and then she buys them bright and short and defiant, showing off what this body has, what it can do, the way she can own all of those eyes now like she always could own their souls and their beating hearts if they just opened their minds the teensiest crack. Just enough for her to get her fingernails in.

Every trip to town, they make a point of stopping at that gas station the girl found along the way, the one with the old blind woman who remembers stories about Papa Justify. He gets a kick out of it, standing there smiling at her while she doesn't have a damn clue. They both like to stand out there in the yard and smoke cigarettes and watch those people with their brick dust and their chicken bones, the people Caroline had thought were ignorant as dirt, the people who are as safe as anyone can be from what Cecile and Justify can do, because they have enough respect to protect themselves.

If they were always going to be careful, though, they wouldn't be themselves, wouldn't ever have found the spells and charms to make it this far, wouldn't have been clever and cunning and patient enough to make this work three times over. So one night do their charms for luck and to turn prying eyes aside, and they go into the city to be free and wild and young and _powerful_ for a night, one night among all the blind fools of this new world that they've watched grow up and bloom.

The city, especially, is a night-blooming flower, Cecile thinks as they drive down into the heart of it, the buildings lit up and singing and dancing like they're alive. She always has liked the night-bloomers best.

They choose a nightclub at random, and the music is different from any they've ever heard, but the way it crawls under her skin and into her blood is the same. There are ghosts of the old music in it, Cecile's music and what should have been Madeleine's and what should have been Violet's, and she wonders if music like her and Justify are, if it trades bodies but the spirit is the same moving through time. Old wine in new bottles, old souls in new bones.

They dance all the way through the night, until the club throws them out, and then they tango in the street and howl at the moon and stagger home in the glare of the sunrise.

She pushes him down in the chair on the back porch, overlooking the garden, and settles herself in his lap, sliding down until she feels him thick and hard inside her. They fuck nice and slow and lazy while the sun comes up to burn the mists off the swamp.

The garden is growing good and strong, growing the roots and herbs that are more of her blood than blood anymore. Down under the plants, under the tree that's throwing a shadow across them in the chair, the bones they were born in are rotting away to dust. Up here in the world, the sun's climbing the sky while she arches and curses and begs him for harder deeper more, reveling in feeling him through every nerve, here in the house that's theirs for as long as one brick stands, and Cecile and Justify are going to live _forever_.


End file.
